The biggest recent Microsoft news for the Entrprise Connect audience was the release late last year of Lync, the third generation of the OCS communications platform. But Wednesday's keynote from Kirk Koenigsbauer, corporate VP, Office Business Productivity Group at Microsoft, showed that Microsoft is taking a much broader view of the world of communications than just Lync.
Just sending Koenigsbauer to speak to the Enterprise Connect audience was a statement; Koenigsbauer is in charge of not just Lync, but also Exchange and SharePoint, and Microsoft clearly wants to let communications decision-makers know that all of these products--and the functions they enable--are inextricably, well, linked.
When Koenigsbauer demo-ed Lync, he showed off the various integrations with SharePoint, such as bringing up your contacts' skills and other attributes out of SharePoint, and even tying these into a spiffy translation engine powered by Microsoft's Bing search engine. Koenigsbauer IM'ed with a Spanish-speaking colleague, writing to her in English, seeing the message come through to her in Spanish, and then reversing the process with her response.
The other cool demo was the integration of Lync with Microsoft's xBox/Kinect, which enables Lync-powered videoconferencing on a home television. This may not be the primary business video scenario, but it makes a certain amount of sense for home workers to use their best-quality video system--their television, in most cases--for certain conferences.
Koenigsbauer also promised that Lync would be available on all mobile systems--not just Windows Phone 7, but also Blackberry, iPhone, Android and Nokia/Symbian. Koenigsbauer's reasoning was simply, "We want to be where the users are."
The keynote also featured a conversation between Koenigsbauer and a panel of Lync customers, each chosen to show off a different kind of implementation. Among the highlights: George Bedar, CIO of LA Fitness, described a rollout of Lync telephony to 20,000 users; "all legacy systems are done," he said.
LA Fitness has already finished deploying OCS Communicator R2 client, and is embarked on its Lync client upgrade, he added. He praised the impact that the system's desktop sharing and conferencing has had on work processes, and said the company's in-house Microsoft developers are working on tying Lync into workflows going forward.
Another customer, David Giambruno, CIO of Revlon, said Lync had helped his company by accelerating the pace at which new products can be developed and announced--which he said is critical in the fast-moving world of fashion. He even had real-live metrics: Increases in number of completed "projects," (Revlon's term for products) has increased 295% since the Lync deployment, he said.
Koenigsbauer closed with a roadmap, reiterating the commitment to Lync clients on all mobile systems, and saying that Lync Online would be included as a hosted service offering as part of Microsoft's cloud-based Office 365 service.
